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Thursday, March 24, 2005

MH - Happening Here and Now

by
Our Word

Dawn Eden shares an email from a reader who finds the truth about Terri in the words of Chesterton. GKC's description of the crowd that gathered around the Cross on Good Friday:

The mob went along with the Sadducees and the Pharisees, the philosophers and the moralists. It went along with the imperial magistrates and the sacred priests, the scribes and the soldiers, that the one universal human spirit might suffer a universal condemnation; that there might be one deep, unanimous chorus of approval and harmony when Man was rejected of men.

We wonder how that could have happened, just as we ask how an event like the Holocaust could have happened in our "enlightened" age, while at the same time America is engaged in a holocaust of its own against its unborn, its elderly, and its disabled. But the events of the last week are indeed playing themselves out in this country, and will continue to do so long after Terri Schiavo's life has ended.

Well, perhaps "long after" is a little bit of a stretch. It may not take that long. The concluding comments echo what I've been thinking, but this says it with a much greater impact:

But America today is like Rome was then - the best and highest accomplishment of human beings, and yet it's still not enough. It's failing the test, and in the same way that Rome failed. If 'the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world' is not a fair description of America, I don't know what is, and yet this is where it has brought us. We know what came after Rome; what can come after America, I don't know, but I do think that THIS America is not one that can resist the avalanche that's just started under its feet.

I've quoted Jefferson before (and, by the way, what must the Founders think of all this?), and I'll do it again: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever." After Pearl Harbor Admiral Yamamoto said (or at least is credited with saying) "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." How ironic that we are now in Japan's shoes, awaiting the terrible resolve of God's awakened justice.